Anti-censorship demos in St Petersburg. Most of their ancestors were killed

What exactly is news?

1. News is updated information about events. Its function is to protect us against potential threats, for we live and die by finding out what is going on and the way events impinge upon us.

2. The better we are at accessing and evaluating news the more successful we are, whether we are talking about where to live (not in the Congo), where we work (not in a company about which rumours are flying), how we preserve our own wealth (by discovering market risks), how we preserve our own health (by garnering medical news) or, most of all, what political system we choose to live under.

3. As such the acquisition of news knows no boundaries and no constraints: laws limiting access to news are not binding on the individual, whether the society is democratic or non-democratic. Potential victims of state action, for example, can be divided into two groups, those who ensure they gain the necessary information to protect themselves, whether in Nazi Germany, the USSR, Cambodia or Ruanda, and those who do not: the latter generally die.

4. News comes from gossip, media organizations and informal information exchanges within institutions. Recently some, in disorganized and untrustworthy form, has come from the internet.

5. For the end consumer the acquisition of news is to be sharply distinguished from its subsequent use, like a weapon kept at home, whether legal or illegal. Its use for personal purposes, that is, differs from its use in the public realm – public statements, defamation, threats to overweening governments etc. These latter, sometimes known as “free speech”, carry risks to the propagator which have to be carefully evaluated in advance.

6. News has a financial value. Obtaining wide-scale news on a regular and reliable basis involves signing up to a News Agency, which sells unspun news, a raw material like wool. Most people are unwilling or unable to pay the cost of subscription to an agency and as a result in modern societies agency news is bought by the media, repackaged and spun into an entertainment product and, as such, supplied at minimal cost to the consumer.

7. In democratic societies the general commercial activities which surround this repackaging business attract bodies which operate to pervert the acquisition of news by interfering with the spinning process, usually, but not always, for financial reasons. The most important of these bodies at present are the lawyers and the PR and lobbying companies.

That’s it, that’s the beast we’re talking about when we consider the activities of bodies like the Leveson Inquiry and phenomena like internet news and, for us, when we involve ourselves with the Madeleine McCann Affair

Three group practitioners of the Dirty Art

(note from Wintabells - sorry, I couldn't get the third image to post)

Different Approaches

While that affair attracted large numbers of people interested, or working in, child welfare and similar activities it also drew into its ambit others, like the Blacksmith Bureau, whose primary interest was not that of children, or child welfare or crime, whether involving children or not. Instead it was concerned with the specific matters in paragraphs 1-7 above.

That is one of the reasons, to be frank, for a certain amount of poor communication between these different camps. To those of the first persuasion, whether “pro” or “anti”, the emotional question of the fate of that particular child and the threat to children generally is paramount; to those of our group it is secondary to the issue of news, its origins and its packaging and, particularly, the issues raised by paragraph 7 above, which the original Bureau had been writing and campaigning about for some years before 2007.

Hence some of the differences in emotional approach to the subject. To the Blacksmith Bureau such temporary phenomena as the paedophile hysteria or the misguided hatred of the Murdoch Empire are simply irrelevant to the issue and the sentimentality which is inseparable from the affair is seen as illusion or deception, including self-deception. In turn, those of the “Madeleine comes first” persuasion find this approach heartless and perhaps mysterious. By laying out above what the real issues are for us we hope that something has been done to clarify the reasons for our differences, including our recent assault on some of the forums which perhaps we can leave for now.

Some people reading those recent posts were struck by the violence of the attack and wondered whether more lay behind it – extreme disillusion? – than was acknowledged in them.

On reflection yes, they are probably right. Behind the criticisms is an implicit acknowledgment that the Net, after 5 years of the McCann affair, has been a profound disappointment to many of our hopes, despite the brilliant contribution it made initially and despite such permanent achievements as the McCann Files and a few similar sites.

The reasons for that disappointment, for those who are interested, will be given in the next post – if the loony Lord Justice and his clever schemes don’t freeze it out.